Let’s be honest here: Year-end is fast approaching, and for most companies that leaves not too many selling days in the fiscal year. And you know what that means, right? Q4 celebration? Holiday parties? Well, maybe … but it’s a critical time to finalize, or for some begin, planning your sales kickoff meeting, too.
What is the point of a sales kickoff meeting, SKO or larger inner circle rah-rah-rah shindig?
I’ve been involved in many of these over the years, and historically, the goal is to round up your sales folks remotely or in a resort-type atmosphere and provide motivational speakers, ample amounts of food, “beverages,” educational courses and/or team building exercises, all with the objective of motivating performance to achieve sales goals for the upcoming year.
Everyone is supposed to walk out of their sales kickoff meeting dying to get back on the phones, so they can share all of their new ideas for blowing out their upcoming sales goals. Does this always happen? Not if the meeting lacked strategy and proper planning.
Here are three tips to avoid that and plan a rockin’ sales kickoff meeting:
1. Peer recognition and success stories – get tech savvy.
Recognizing top performers or sales members for big wins should be incorporated in any sales kickoff meeting. Think about running a real-time leaderboard that scrolls through all the annual leaders for pipeline building activities and of course, closed revenue. Also, tools like Work.com enable you to recognize and award badges for achieving milestones, top-performing teams and significant small wins. (Find out why small sales wins matter.)
2. President’s Club…yes please!
Why not introduce your new President’s Club contest on Day 1 of your annual kickoff? This will allow salespeople to understand in real-time where they stand amongst their peers and keep critical KPIs top of mind. This is a great way to maintain motivation and enable sales teams to plan and execute to achieve their targets, too. (Get a few tips for running a successful President’s Club.)
3. Team building minus the fromage.
To be clear, “fromage” is a cheese originating from the north of France and the south of Belgium; the name actually means “fresh cheese” in French. Okay – now we have that out of the way. The goal of every team building event is to build company morale. Some of these exercises can come off quite cheesy to employees, and the result is actually polar opposite of what leadership is trying to achieve. Make team building fun and purposeful, and leave the fromage in the refrigerator. (Check out some ideas for small incentive ideas to pass out after your team building event.)
Take on these 3 tips, and you’ll take your sales team into the new year the right way. Get ready to crush the new year.
